John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

Later, when the servant brought the children home from school, I took Kleon in to see her. He was ten, a thoughtful, moody child, and it was better that he see her than wonder.

“Is she dead?” he asked.

I shook my head. “She’s all right. She just can’t move right now. She’ll be herself in a day or so.”

He sat down on the edge of the bed, watching me to see if it was all right.

“Touch her hand if you want,” I said. “She knows you’re here. She just can’t talk.”

It was true that she knew he was there. There were tears in her eyes. He touched her hand. “What’s wrong with her?” he asked.

I thought. “She’s unhappy. So unhappy she can’t move. She doesn’t believe I love her, though I do.”

“Will she know in a day or so, when she gets well?”

A logician, poor child. A philosopher. His life was going to be hell. “No,” I said. “Once you ask that question — does he love me? — you ask it forever.”

He patted her hand, full of sadness. I believe he understood.

I stayed with her, watching for a sign. When I woke up in the morning, two days later, she had turned her face toward me and was looking at me. When I realized what it meant, I kissed her. She returned the kiss, gentle, full of sorrow.

“I do know you love me,” she said. “But I have to go. I’ll go back to Athens, with the children.”

“Don’t talk,” I said. “Later.”

She was quiet for a while, and I lay with my cheek on her shoulder. At last she said, “No one should have as much power over another person as you have over me. There’s nothing I can do to you. If I sleep with another man, it doesn’t bother you. If I ever tried to fight you, you’d break my neck. I’m helpless. You have no feelings.”

“I do,” I said.

She rolled her head back and forth on the pillow. “No. I’m not criticizing. It’s just a fact. There’s nothing I can do to hurt you the way you hurt me. It’s not fair.”

“Don’t think about it,” I said. I kissed her shoulder. “Go to sleep.”

She did. She slept until late afternoon, and when she awakened she looked as if she hadn’t slept in days. She looked old. “Agathon,” she said, “I can’t stand leaving you.”

“Then don’t.”

“I have to. But not Athens.”

“Whatever you say.”

“You have to help me. I’m too tired to think. Where should we go?”

I shook my head. “Why should I help you do what I don’t want you to do? Work it out yourself.”

She stayed that night, putting it off until tomorrow, and I made love to her. The next morning I said, “Put it off for a week. If it’s serious it will still be serious a week from now.”

She looked frightened. “You know what will happen. I’ll stay.”

“Maybe. But try it. One day at a time, second by second.”

She put if off for a week and decided to stay.

I visited Iona and told her what had happened. Iona said nothing when I told her, merely, “Strange.” I couldn’t tell whether she was alarmed or grieved or what: her face was wood. She asked me questions about Tuka, and I told her all I could — her childhood, her father, her friends, her music. She kissed me when I left — clung to me, her cheek against mine, but she looked past me, her mind far away. A few days later I visited her again. We sat in the garden behind her house, where she’d been collecting flowers for one of her decorations. She said, cold-eyed, smiling like ice, “I’ve figured out why I love you, Agathon.”

“Good,” I said.

“It’s a kind of revolt. I’ve cleaned house, cooked meals, borne children, all without stopping to think about it — obeying the laws of Nature and Society. I’m tired of it. I want to be something.”

“Commendable,” I said.

“Don’t mock. I mean it. If it weren’t you, it might have been someone else. When I fell in love with Dorkis it was because the time had come for me to break free. From my parents, that time. From childhood. Now it’s from the drudgery of a wife.”

“Maybe that’s so,” I said, though it wasn’t. She knew it wasn’t. I looked up into the bare branches of the tree arching above us. I was very tired. The chilly air seemed heavy on my arms and legs and chest. My bad leg, asleep, was heavy as a log.

After a long time, Iona said, “Do you suppose everyone in Sparta knows about us?”

“I suppose,” I said.

“Then we should stop, shouldn’t we?” She pursed her lips, seriously considering it, or pretending to, peering into the cup of the dark-red flower in her hand as if the answer might be hidden there, written on the petals.

“It would be a terrific idea, if it were possible.”

She started to nod, then checked herself, still studying the flower. “Anything’s possible, Agathon.” Her smile could bring an early winter.

I shrugged. “Sure.” So break it off, I thought.

She leaned forward, clasping her knees in her arms. All I thought, all I was, disgusted her. I couldn’t miss it. “You really believe that no one can ever change anything, don’t you?”

“No,” I said. “One can change things. One can stab people. One can break up people’s homes. One can throw out one tyrannical government and put in a new one for somebody else to throw out.”

“Solon’s?” she asked. “Is that tyrannical?”

“Not at the moment,” I said. “Not fully.”

She sighed, then smiled like alum in your teeth. “Thank God I’m no philosopher.”

“Oh, you’re a philosopher, all right. You’ll no more start a revolution than”—I hesitated, then went wearily on—“than Dorkis.”

“Wait and see,” she said.

Her tone grieved me. At least for now, she meant it.

“Second by second,” I said.

“Oh, nonsense. You say that too often. ‘Second by second.’ You’re like a machine.” Her annoyance was not seductive now. It was withering. I felt a queer flash of panic.

“It’s true,” I said, clownishly morose. “Except that I don’t say it. I just open my mouth and it comes out — an impulse from the gods.”

“There are no gods,” she said.

I looked up into the trees.

When we parted, that day, we didn’t kiss, though she gave me one of her flowers, breaking a petal off as she dropped the flower in my hand. No doubt she had her mind on the revolution.

Tuka said, “You were there?”

I nodded. “I was there.”

I spent the afternoon with the children, telling them the glorious story of Herakles.

“Tell them the story of Akhilles,” Tuka said, “how the poor boy died for love.”

I smiled and shook my head. “An idle tale.”

I can’t get the picture of my mother out of my mind. The white hair, the tremble of the knobby fingers. I’ve got to get out of here. And yet how can I? Even if I could escape some way, or get the tall ephor to do something, as I’m convinced he wants to, even then could I go back to my mother and help her, now when she needs me, and not help poor Agathon? I think of taking care of them together, feeding them and waiting on them in the same house, and I laugh. It would be safer putting a tiger and a smart old snake together in a cage. Yet I’ve got to do something. No choice.

I told Agathon the problem and he went on writing, scratch on scratch, leaking out the obscenity of his life. “She’s old,” he said. “Everybody dies eventually.”

“I could say the same of you,” I said.

He paused and glanced up, leering. “You’re beginning to catch on!”

Smart-ass old bastard. I should brain him with the chamberpot. But I was only mad for a second or two. I understand him better and better. He’s philosophical about death. Good. But I hear how he groans and whimpers in his sleep, and I see how goddamn scared he is when he peeks out through the cell door, watching the fires. He jokes about how when they drag him away he’ll bawl like a baby the ephors have decided to throw from a cliff for its sickliness, but I see through the jokes: he really will bawl, and stupidly, hopelessly, he’ll try to bribe them, and when they lift the execution rods over his head he’ll die of terror. So would I, maybe, though I don’t think so. The difference between us is that he hates himself for it, hates himself for everything, and hates everybody else that shares his faults. As simple as that Agathon, the great lover, hates people.